Schnitzler at Berghain
It’s often a fine line between flirting and pulling a face. We might be in a club somewhere, the mood is erotically charged, the beat booming. A woman winks at a man, what begins as flirtation ends in disaster. Maybe the two of them just had too much to drink or took the wrong kind of drugs. Increasingly losing control of their facial features, they are people turning into puppets, grotesque beings compulsively repeating strange movements because they are no longer in command of their bodies.
Desire and the uncanny are the two poles demarcating the field of tension in which Alexandra Bachzetsis’ performance Chasing a Ghost takes place. The evening begins like a fashion show: two dancers wearing the same kind of jacket (one red, one blue) – with wide shoulder pads, as if they were beamed directly from the 1980s on a power-dressing mission – strike poses familiar from advertising photography. In tights and high heels, dominating, as if star photographer Helmut Newton was taking their pictures.
The pulsating music isn’t pre-recorded, there are two pianos on stage – doing what you wouldn’t normally expect them to do. Pianists Mischa Cheung and Simon Bucher work them like DJs work their turntables. A sound like techno but interpreted live on the grand pianos. The music is one of the highlights of the evening, although the volume could have been turned up a notch to create an even more physical experience of the sound while watching what’s happening on stage.
From a purely dancing point of view, Chasing a Ghost consists of duets as we know them from classical ballet, only more diverse, more modern, more inscrutable. There is a great martial-arts scene that features the doppelganger motif: the two dancers share a tracksuit, one wears the top, the other the bottom part. There is an energetic duet between two men fusing disco moves and tap dance (both are wearing a jacket and underpants). Are they couples? Eerie doppelgangers? Surreal twins like in the movie The Shining? Or are different parts inside one person fighting against each other? The production suggests, leaves a few things unresolved.
A camera in the right-hand corner of the stage contributes to the alienation as well. It’s filming live and the video is being transmitted to a screen. The video surveillance works like a small darkroom: couples kissing each other in close-up, bodies writhing on faux fur, perfectly choreographed soft-porn images that play with erotic superficialities. One of the dancers sings a melancholy, altered version of Pass This On, the gender-fluid classic about desire by The Knife. Taking on the role of a Venus in Furs, Bachzetsis sings a chanson. But then faces are superimposed and dissolve on the screen, and at the very end, one of the dancers stands up and leaves. Irritatingly, the live recording of him remains. Which is more powerful: the original or the representation? And: Which images can you trust?
Bachzetsis says she was inspired by Schnitzler’s scandalous piece Reigen, which was first performed in 1912. In ten erotic dialogues, a society at the turn of the century reveals its true colours, people are having sex with each other across class divides (mercilessly exploiting their positions of power in the process). The piece caused a scandal. While the sexual act itself was not shown, everybody knew: the ellipsis dots in the text meant that the characters were getting down to business. There is one scene before and one after sex.
In a contemporary update, Bachzetsis’ take on the material is about desire and the (media) images we have of it. Seduction and consumption, (sexual) identity and our bodies, which tell their own, often quite subversive story. The subconscious likes to unexpectedly meddle with the cool experimental arrangements of this choreographer and dancer, driving wedges into the beautiful surface. In her upcoming work, 2020: Obscene (at TQW from 20 January 2023), the complex relationships between scene and obscenity, body and image are set to be examined even more explicitly. The study of excess and its manipulation is taken to the next level – to be continued…
Karin Cerny, born 1968 in Waldviertel, Lower Austria, studied German and theatre studies in Vienna and Berlin. She regularly writes about theatre in Profil and Theater heute as well as about fashion in Rondo.